Energy consumption model and measurement results for network coding-enabled IEEE 802.11 meshed wireless networks

This paper presents an energy model and energy measurements for network coding enabled wireless meshed networks based on IEEE 802.11 technology. The energy model and the energy measurement testbed is limited to a simple Alice and Bob scenario. For this toy scenario we compare the energy usages for a system with and without network coding support. While network coding reduces the number of radio transmissions, the operational activity on the devices due to coding will be increased. We derive an analytical model for the energy consumption and compare it to real measurements for which we build a flexible, low cost tool to be able to measure at any given node in a meshed network. We verify the precision of our tool by comparing it to a sophisticated device. Our main results in this paper are the derivation of an analytical energy model, the implementation of a distributed energy measurement testbed conducting a series of measurements, and finally a comparison of the analytical energy model and the data achieved by our testbed.